Power converters are used to convert input electrical energy from one form to another for driving a load. One form of power conversion system is a motor drive, which may be employed for variable speed operation of an electric motor load. For applications requiring fairly large output voltages, so-called multilevel voltage source converter architectures have been developed, including flying capacitor designs, neutral point clamped (NPC) designs, as well as cascaded and hybrid typologies. NPC designs include a pair of capacitors connected across a DC input providing a neutral node, with each capacitor being charged to half the DC input value. A series of switches are connected across the DC bus, with a pair of diodes connecting intermediate switch nodes to the neutral point. The NPC converter advantageously provides a relatively simple circuit structure, but increasing the number of output levels in an NPC converter increases switching and diode conduction losses and leads to increased reverse recovery current flow. Moreover, high output level NPC converters suffer from uneven distribution of switching device losses thereby limiting the maximum power rating, output current and switching frequency for a given switch type. In addition, the number of clamping diodes increases substantially as the number of output levels increases. Flying capacitor designs utilize one or more capacitors that are selectively interconnected to provide the output voltage. This type of multilevel converter, however, suffers from the need for high switching frequencies to keep the capacitors properly balanced, and the voltages on the flying capacitors must be initialized. Cascaded H-bridge (CHB) topologies may be used to achieve significantly high output voltage levels and high output power ratings, while allowing the use of relatively low switching frequencies and low voltage components. However, CHB designs require a significantly higher number of components to achieve regenerative operation, and a CHB converter typically requires a phase-shifting transformer, leading to higher cost. Moreover, the CHB approach requires a large number of isolated DC sources. Accordingly, a need remains for improved multilevel power converters and system designs capable of providing multilevel inverter output capability for driving the load at variable speeds and torques.